Some protocols used over networks are based on multicast messages for communicating among nodes in the network. For example, in networks used for communication among lighting and other stage production equipment (sometimes referred to as “entertainment networks”), control consoles using multicast-based protocols may be employed to manage various different groups of nodes. Protocols that use multicast messages efficiently scale to large numbers of nodes because network devices, such as a network switch, can filter out the multicast messages that are not associated with a node on a given network interface. As a result, a given node is less likely to receive and be burdened with decoding messages that are not relevant to the respective node.
However, some nodes may be incapable of communicating using multicast-based protocols; often such devices instead communicate using protocols based on broadcast messages. As the size of the network grows, the network traffic produced by such broadcast-based protocols can overload some nodes since each of the broadcast messages are flooded throughout the network. Nodes with limited processing and memory capacity are especially susceptible as it may be necessary for individual nodes to receive the entire broadcast message, cache it, and decode the message before determining if the message is relevant to itself or not (e.g., the message was for another node). Thus, it is desirable to limit the extent to which broadcast messages are used in the network. What is needed is a network device that can translate multicast messages received from control consoles or other nodes into broadcast messages for those nodes or other devices that communicate via broadcast messages.